New Mexico Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham at a Politico energy meeting warned the Biden administration last week she will use “every tool” she has available to prevent a high-level nuclear waste site in the Land of Enchantment. She may get some help from the local oil and gas industry, whose practices have raised the issue of whether the site near Carlsbad in the heart of the Permian Basin has unexamined earthquake potential.
Holtec Industries, which recently won a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission license for its long-sought site to store reactor spent fuel, hopes initially to store 8,680 tonnes of spent fuel in 500 dry cask containers for up to 40 years. Holtec has its eyes on eventually storing 10,000 canisters partially buried in the New Mexico ground.
Forbes reported on Monday (May 21), “It seems the safety analysis, and the earthquake predictions, were done by Holtec before the shale-oil revolution took off in the Delaware basin around 2009. In fact, one Holtec graphic of earthquake probability was dated in 2009 (14 years ago) when the shale oil and gas technology was just a child in its Permian life. In 2009, virtually no produced water had to be disposed of and there were no induced earthquakes.”
Earthquakes in the basin are man-made, a product of injecting waste water used to fracture rock strata releasing hydrocarbons into underground disposal at high pressure. The seismic phenomenon was first observed in Oklahoma. The New York Times in 2016 reported, “Scientists and regulators agree that earthquakes like the 5.6-magnitude tremor that struck Oklahoma on Saturday, and thousands of smaller ones in recent years, have been spurred by the disposal of millions of tons of wastewater that is pumped to the surface, and then injected back into the ground, during oil and gas production.”
Forbes author Ian Palmer, a veteran of the oil and gas industry, noted that three man-made temblors in Oklahoma – two greater than 5 on the logarithmic “moment magnitude scale” – “caused significant damage to surface buildings in the period around 2015.”
He wrote, “It is clear that oil and gas operations that trigger earthquakes down below are not an ideal neighbor to a nuclear waste storage site at the surface – because dangerous earthquakes that can travel hundreds of miles have already been recorded in the Permian basin, including New Mexico.”
The Holtec site, according to Palmer, “is close to hundreds of oil and gas wells,” and a 5.4 magnitude quake on Nov. 16, 2022 was only about 60 miles from the site. Ironically, Lujan Grisham on the same date wrote Biden, asking him to oppose the Holtec waste repository, citing a number of potential social and environmental threats.
In the Politico meeting, Lujan Grisham alluded to the fact New Mexico has long been a site for federal and federally-approved nuclear projects, including the Waste Isolation Pilot Project near Carlsbad, where transuranic waste is stored in salt deposits (and has a checkered history), as well as two Department of Energy national labs – Los Alamos and Sandia. “I think other states need to step up. I think other solutions need to step up,” she said. “But don’t expect us to always do the heavy lifting here.”
The history of nuclear waste disposal in the U.S. is a tale of failure after ignominious failure. A recent reminder of that sorry story comes from the Tri-City Herald in Washington state, where tanks storing radioactive liquid wastes at DOE’s Hanford weapons facility reprocessing plutonium for bombs have been a problem going back some 80 years, without a solution.
The newspaper reported May 11 that the state and DOE reached a settlement agreement to evaluate two options to speed up removal of the nuclear waste from one of two giant steel single-shell tanks leaking a noxious brew of radioactive and hazardous liquid waste. The tanks have been leaking into the soil above the ground water that feeds the Columbia River for at least four years. The state and the feds reached an agreement last August on an “approach to waste leaking from Hanford’s tanks.”
For decades, the federal government agencies responsible for Hanford – the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Energy Research and Development Administration, and DOE – essentially ignored the Hanford brew, insisting that it couldn’t leak from the tanks. When it did, they said it couldn’t reach the ground water. When it did, they kicked the atomic can down the bureaucratic road.
They are still at it. At a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing last month, according to the Tri-City Herald, DOE estimated that “$300 billion to $640 billion will be needed to complete the remainder of Hanford environmental cleanup by 2078.”
Then there was the Lyon, Kansas, salt dome fiasco; the spent fuel reprocessing financial futility; and, last but not least, the Yucca Mountain fraud. Over a decade ago, a joke circulating among nuclear circles went like this:
Question: What do you call it when you dig a hole in the desert, dump $15 billion into it, and walk away?
Answer: Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
–Kennedy Maize
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